Is Tim Cook the right CEO for the company at this time?

A: I hold the belief that he’s been CEO for much longer than it seems. Jobs was not a CEO in any traditional sense. He was head of product and culture and all-around micromanager. He left the operational side of the company to Cook who actually built it into a colossus. Think along the lines of the pairing of Howard Hughes and Frank William Gay. What people look for in Cook is the qualities that Jobs had but those qualities and duties are now dispersed among a large team. The question isn’t whether Cook can be the “Chief Magical Officer” but rather whether the functional team that’s around Cook can do the things Jobs used to do.

[…]

Q: You’ve written extensively on the post-PC period, when will we come to the post-phone period – if ever?

A: I think less than 10 years. Maybe even five. A wristband today can have more processing power than the original iPhone. An iPhone has more power than a desktop did 4 years ago. The speed of change is incredible.

{ Interview with Horace Dediu | Continue reading }

In most parts of the world, the banking system is closely regulated and monitored by central banks and other government agencies. That’s just as it should be, you might think.

But banks have a way round this kind of regulation. For the last decade or so, it has become common practice for banks to do business in ways that don’t show up on conventional balance sheets. Before the 2008 financial crisis, for example, many investment banks financed mortgages in this way. To all intents and purposes, these transactions are invisible to regulators.

This so-called shadow banking system is huge and important. Indeed, many economists blame activities that took place in the shadow banking system for the 2008 crash.

Davide Fiaschi, an economist at the University of Pisa in Italy, and a couple of pals reveal […] that the shadow banking system is vastly bigger than anyone had imagined before. And although its size dropped dramatically after the financial crisis in 2008, it has since grown dramatically and is today significantly bigger than it was even then.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

art { Martin Honert, Group of Teachers, 2012 }

{ The Five Cognitive Distortions of People Who Get Stuff Done | PDF }

Yes, we can imagine someone so smart that he can make himself smarter, which in turn allows him to make himself smarter still, until he becomes so smart we lesser intelligences can’t even understand him anymore. […]

1. If you take a thorough look at actually existing creatures, it’s not clear that smarter creatures have any tendency to increase their intelligence. This is obvious if you focus on standard IQ: High-IQ adults […] don’t get any smarter as time goes on. […]

2. In the real-world, self-reinforcing processes eventually asymptote. So even if smarter creatures were able to repeatedly increase their own intelligence, we should expect the incremental increases to get smaller and smaller over time, not skyrocket to infinity.

{ EconLib | Continue reading }

Wine Snake Bites Woman After Spending 3 Months In The Bottle.

New Smartphone Tech To Alert Pedestrians: ‘You Are About To Be Hit By a Car’. And there’s another phone app in development to help you avoid gunfire.

The number of fires is down but the number of career firefighters is up.

Oxford researchers say that 45 percent of America’s jobs will be automated within the next 20 years.

Wasted rice in Asia emits over 600 million tonnes of greenhouse gases a year.

Germany is the first European country to recognize a third gender.

Are women less corrupt?

Your DNA is not a blueprint. Day by day, week by week, your genes are in a conversation with your surroundings. Your neighbors, your family, your feelings of loneliness: They don’t just get under your skin, they get into the control rooms of your cells.

Do Left Handed People Die Young?

According to surveys of art books and exhibitions, artists prefer poses showing the left side of the face when composing a portrait and the right side when composing a self-portrait. Smartphones Reveal a Side Bias in Non-Artists.

A recent paper published in the Journal of Communication found that exposure to pornography was related to and increased sexist attitudes, but only among a subgroup of users.

Sexiest parts of the body.

There is currently an article making the rounds in the popular media suggesting that testicular volume is a predictor of paternal investment in children.

Americans use the Internet to abandon children adopted from overseas.

Could paper aeroplanes be used as disposable, biodegradable monitoring-and-surveillance drones?

Chinese Researchers Make An Invisibility Cloak In 15 Minutes.

Before the advent of gas or electric ovens, dogs also provided a convenient power source for kitchen appliances.

Why You Can’t Travel Back in Time and Kill Hitler.

What if a typical family spent like the federal government?

New toilet-themed restaurant opens in China.

Yes, I’m the real Sammy Sosa, and this is my Pinterest.

Triggered lightning technology.

The visible universe—including Earth, the sun, other stars, and galaxies—is made of protons, neutrons, and electrons bundled together into atoms. Perhaps one of the most surprising discoveries of the 20th century was that this ordinary, or baryonic, matter makes up less than 5 percent of the mass of the universe.

The rest of the universe appears to be made of a mysterious, invisible substance called dark matter (25 percent) and a force that repels gravity known as dark energy (70 percent).

Scientists have not yet observed dark matter directly. It doesn’t interact with baryonic matter and it’s completely invisible to light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation, making dark matter impossible to detect with current instruments. […]

Dark energy is even more mysterious, and its discovery in the 1990s was a complete shock to scientists. Previously, physicists had assumed that the attractive force of gravity would slow down the expansion of the universe over time. But when two independent teams tried to measure the rate of deceleration, they found that the expansion was actually speeding up. One scientist likened the finding to throwing a set of keys up in the air expecting them to fall back down-only to see them fly straight up toward the ceiling.

Scientists now think that the accelerated expansion of the universe is driven by a kind of repulsive force generated by quantum fluctuations in otherwise “empty” space. What’s more, the force seems to be growing stronger as the universe expands. For lack of a better name, scientists call this mysterious force dark energy.

{ National Geographic | Continue reading }

When I eventually returned to my desk at Keele University School of Psychology I wondered why it was that people swear in response to pain. Was it a coping mechanism, an outlet for frustration, or what? […]

Professor Timothy Jay of Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in the States […] has forged a career investigating why people swear and has written several books on the topic. His main thesis is that swearing is not, as is often argued, a sign of low intelligence and inarticulateness, but rather that swearing is emotional language.

{ The Pyschologist | Continue reading }

Jellyfish stings are often not much more than a painful interlude in a seaside holiday—unless you happen to live in northern Australia. There, you might be stung by the most venomous creature on Earth: the box jellyfish, Chironex fleckeri.

Box jellyfish have bells (the disc-shaped “head”) around a foot across, behind which trail up to 550 feet of tentacles. It’s the tentacles that contain the stinging cells, and if just six yards of tentacle contact your skin, you have, on average, four minutes to live—though you might die in just two. Seventy-six fatalities have been recorded in Australia since 1884, and many more may have gone misdiagnosed or unreported. […]

Most jellyfish are little more than gelatinous bags containing digestive organs and gonads, drifting at the whim of the current. But box jellyfish are different. They are active hunters of medium-sized fish and crustaceans, and can move at up to twenty-one feet per minute. They are also the only jellyfish with eyes that are quite sophisticated, containing retinas, corneas, and lenses. And they have brains, which are capable of learning, memory, and guiding complex behaviors. […]

In Stung! On Jellyfish Blooms and the Future of the Ocean, biologist Lisa-ann Gershwin argues that after half a billion years of quiescence, they’re on the move:

If I offered evidence that jellyfish are displacing penguins in Antarctica—not someday, but now, today—what would you think? If I suggested that jellyfish could crash the world’s fisheries, outcompete the tuna and swordfish, and starve the whales to extinction, would you believe me?

[…]

On the night of December 10, 1999, 40 million Filipinos suffered a sudden power blackout. President Joseph Estrada was unpopular, and many assumed that a coup was underway. […] Fifty truckloads of the creatures had been sucked into the cooling system of a major coal-fired power plant, forcing an abrupt shutdown.

Japan’s nuclear power plants have been under attack by jellyfish since the 1960s, with up to 150 tons per day having to be removed from the cooling system of just one power plant.

{ The New York Review of Books | Continue reading }

image { Tim Hawkinson }

Human skin is inhabited and re-populated depending on health conditions, age, genetics, diet, the weather and climate zones, occupations, cosmetics, soaps, hygienic products and moisturizers. All these factors contribute to the variation in the types of microbes. Population of viruses, for example, can include a mixture of good ones - like bacteriophages fighting acne-causing Propionibacterium  - and bad ones  - as highly contagious Mesles. Bacterial communities include thousands of species of Actinobacteria, Bacteroidetes, Cyanobacteria, Proteobacteria, and fungi Malassezia. […]

The major odor-causing substances are sulphanyl alkanols, steroid derivatives and short volatile branched-chain fatty acids.

Most common sulphanyl alkanol in human sweat, 3-methyl-3-sulfanylhexan-1-ol is produced by bacteria in several ways. […] Besides being a major descriptor of human sweat odor,  is also present in beers.

{ Aurametrix | Continue reading }

Researchers want to 3-D print pizza for astronauts.

London skyscraper melts cars, fries eggs.

Women selling positive pregnancy tests on Craigslist.

Drones are slow and noisy; they fly at a low altitude; and they require time to hover over a potential target before being used. The only real way for the United States to use them would be to first destroy Syrian planes and anti-aircraft batteries.

The vast amounts of rain that fell during the Australian floods in 2010 and 2011 caused the world’s sea levels to drop by as much as 7mm, according to oceanographers.

The man whose smelly hallucinations predict the weather.

Number of drivers who say they feel road rage has doubled, poll finds.

Alcohol breaks brain connections needed to process social cues.

During a normal conversation, your brain is constantly adjusting the volume to soften the sound of your own voice and boost the voices of others in the room. New research could lend insight into schizophrenia and mood disorders that arise when brain circuitry goes awry and individuals hear voices other people do not hear..

New research suggests that trypophobia — a fear of holes — may occur as a result of a specific visual feature also found among various poisonous animals.

Single gene change increases mouse lifespan by 20 percent.

People who look young for their age live longer.

While physical health deteriorates when weight is gained, mental well-being seems to improve, especially in women.

Why the other queue always seem to move faster than yours.

Memento and Personal Identity.

What’s more powerful in negotiating: dirty tricks or being a decent person?

What simple thing kills many relationships?

Researchers unveiled a new mechanism that could potentially explain why we recover so slowly from jet-lag.

We’ve been looking at ant intelligence the wrong way.

Recent literature suggests that individuals may consume less food when it is served on red plates.

Truffle Hunting: Why dogs have surpassed pigs.

Just How Bad is Fukushima Fish?

Unlike other weekly news magazines, The Economist refers to itself as a newspaper. Why?

Scientific Speed Reading: How to Read 300% Faster in 20 Minutes.

Ministry of Sound sues Spotify for copyright infringement. Lawsuit focuses on playlists created on streaming music service that mirror dance brand’s compilation albums.

Thomson Reuters has smashed a Brazilian self-citation cartel in which editors of journals cited each other to boost their impact factors.

Second Life: What went wrong?

How the BlackBerry CEOs lost an empire. [Thanks Tim]

Meet 4chan’s /x/philes, investigators of the Internet’s strangest mysteries.

From the other lines in the song, we have come to understand that you may in fact be a ‘God.’ Yet if this were the case  —  and we, of course, take you at your word  —  we wonder why you do not more frequently employ your omnipotence to change time and space to better suit your own personal whims.

My name is Andy. I make maps.

Robotic Doorknob Disinfector.

Jellyfish water balloon.

Business in the front.

You cannot fix the bad boy. He’ll just break your heart and you’ll resent him forever.

{ Fearne Cotton | Continue reading }

“Chris,” a Chicago high school student and gang member and gunslinger, explains exactly how easy it is for he and his fellow gang members to obtain firearms, even if they have criminal records:

“I will make a call and say I need a gun. I will ride down the street on my bike and get it — five minutes.” . . . Chris calls them the “gun guys.” The cops have another name for them: “straw purchasers.”

“Gun guys” have clean records allowing them to obtain Illinois firearm owner’s identification cards. With FOID cards, they can legally buy guns at stores in the suburbs.
Then they illegally sell them to gang members banned from owning guns because of their criminal backgrounds.

Most of the guns recovered in crimes in Chicago were bought in suburban gun stores, according to a new University of Chicago Crime Lab study of police gun-trace data.

As Chris points out, many of these straw purchasers’ full-time job is trading on their clean criminal record to buy guns and then resell them at a markup to dangerous felons. Such professional straw purchasers should be easy to catch. Because federal law requires most gun purchasers to undergo criminal background checks before they can buy a firearm, it should be an easy matter for law enforcement to check whether the same person is purchasing guns over and over and over again.

Except that the so-called “Tiahrt Amendments” thwart such checks by requiring the Justice Department to destroy the record of any gun buyer whose purchase was approved within 24 hours. As a result, law enforcement is often blind to straw purchasers who are flooding the streets with guns right under their noses.

Nor is this the only aspect of federal law that “gun guys” can take advantage of. An estimated 10 percent of all guns used in a crime by juveniles were sold at a gun show or flea market where many of the dealers do not have to conduct criminal background checks on their customers. Indeed, federal officials are often forced to charge straw purchasers with paperwork violations due to the absence of an appropriate law criminalizing unlicensed gun trafficking.

{ Think Progress | Continue reading }

related { Another responsible gun owner just doing his thing }

A day on the planet Venus is longer than a year on the planet Venus.

{ Discover | Continue reading }

Why do we cry when we’re happy?

[The] almond-sized hypothalamus can’t tell the difference between being happy or sad or overwhelmed or stressed. […] All it knows is that it’s getting a strong neural signal from the amygdala, which registers our emotional reactions, and that it must, in turn, activate the autonomic nervous system.

The autonomic nervous system (the “involuntary” nervous system) is divided into two branches: sympathetic (”fight-or-flight”) and parasympathetic (”rest-and-digest”).

Acting via the hypothalamus, the sympathetic nervous system is designed to mobilize the body during times of stress. It’s why our heart rate quickens, why we sweat, why we don’t feel hungry.

The parasympathetic nervous system, on the other hand, essentially calms us back down. The parasympathetic nervous system does something funny, too. Connected to our lacrimal glands (better known as tear ducts), activation of parasympathetic receptors by the neurotransmitter acetylcholine results in tear production. […]

I distinctly remember the feelings of sudden, intense relief. Of happiness. Of weightlessness. Of my heart rate slowing and my parasympathetic nervous system taking over. And, apparently, of acetylcholine synapsing onto lacrimal gland receptors, and of tears pouring down my make-up’d cheeks.

But from a psychological standpoint—beyond the neurotransmitters and stress and hormones—why do we cry at all?

A decade-old theory by Miceli and Castelfranchi proposes that all emotional crying arises from the notion of perceived helplessness, or the idea that one feels powerless when one can’t influence what is going on around them.

{ Gaines, on Brains | Continue reading }

Some memory exercises focus on long-term memory. Two of these are called retrieval practice and elaboration. […]

One way to elaborate is to generate an explanation for why a fact or concept is true (or false). Another way is to self-explain. Simply explain to yourself how the new ideas you’re learning relate to each other, or explain how the new ideas relate to information you already know. Still another is to make a concept map. […]

Retrieval practice is the activity of recalling information you have already committed to memory. You can practice retrieving information by simply trying to recall everything you’ve read or learned about a subject. Or, you can use the self-test approach. Self-testing means that you create questions about the subject and answer them yourself. […]

A recent study published in Science magazine suggests that retrieval practice works surprisingly well. […]

1. Retrieval practice helps you remember more information than elaboration.
2. Retrieval practice helps you understand the information better than elaboration.

{ Global Cognition | Continue reading }

{ Eight things to consider before intervening in Syria }

Woman arrested after restaurant guests covered in soy sauce.

Boulder resident beats raccoon to death as ‘revenge’ for cat’s death.

Former Disney exec’s reputation destroyed after porn-star scandal.

Kim Jong-un’s ex-girlfriend ‘executed by firing squad for appearing in porn films.’

Researchers Grow 3-D Human Brain Tissues.

Shaking hands with a cheat or thief, or merely sitting in a chair they used, is likely to make you experience feelings of guilt, according to a new study.

Learning a new language alters brain development.

How to read and understand a scientific paper: a guide for non-scientists.

5 reasons you should be reading the CIA’s online magazine.

The decline of serial killers and rise of the sharing economy.

Impostor uses Facebook and a co-opted photo to befriend California kids.

Google patents ‘Scroogling.’

Skype confirms 3D video calls are under development.

While some researchers have claimed that war between nations is in decline, a new analysis suggests it is not.

What happened to India’s economic miracle?

Here’s what’s in store for India if the rupee continues to crumble.

In the U.S., Lemann is virtually unknown, even though he and his two longtime partners now control three icons of U.S. consumer culture: Heinz ketchup, Burger King, and Budweiser beer. The combined market value of the companies they run is $187 billion—larger than that of Citigroup.

Does Low-Fat Yogurt Make You Fat?

We discuss the idea of building a 2 km high mountain in the Netherlands.

Rain Room.

Inside the hospital-themed restaurant where meals are eaten in a stylised operating theatre, on a dentist’s chair or in a gynaecologist’s exam room.

In the two years since Atos Origin, the IT consultancy, declared its intention to become a “zero email” company, other companies introducing restrictions include Volkswagen, which has stopped its servers forwarding email to employees’ BlackBerrys outside working hours, and Ferrari, which clamped down on email, arguing that it is often inefficient.

It is not just email. Constant text messaging, Tweeting, checking of social networks can now be seen as a disorder. Last year, “internet addiction” was added to the DSM, the international psychiatric diagnostic manual. Concerned executives from Microsoft, Google, Xerox and Intel got together with academics and consultants some years ago to form the Information Overload Research Group to try to find solutions to the electronic deluge. Basex, the research group, estimated that information overload caused economic losses of $900bn in 2009 alone.

{ FT | Continue reading }

New surgery trend creates perma-smiles for South Korean women

‘Ghostbuster’ Huang Jianjun Allegedly Tried To Perform Exorcism With His Penis.

Woman’s phone bill during trip to Thailand costs more than holiday itself.

NSA officers on several occasions have channeled their agency’s enormous eavesdropping power to spy on love interests.

It has been long known that some people have severe difficulties recognising faces – something called prosopagnosia and sometimes inaccurately labelled ‘face blindness’. But more recently, it was discovered that a tiny minority of people are ‘super recognisers.’

How Short-Term Stress Boosts Immune Systems.

In a technical tour de force, Japanese researchers created eggs and sperm in the laboratory. Now, scientists have to determine how to use those cells safely — and ethically.

Here’s Why Mosquitoes Can’t Transmit HIV.

New research demonstrates that triggering an out-of-body experience (OBE) could be as simple as getting a person to watch a video of themselves with their heartbeat projected onto it.

10 psychological biases and errors we face when driving.

As many as a million young people in Japan are thought to remain holed up in their homes - sometimes for decades at a time.

Some financial lending companies have found that social connections can be a good indicator of a person’s creditworthiness. One such company, Lenddo, determines if you’re friends on Facebook with someone who was late paying back a loan to Lenddo. If so, that’s bad news for you.

A scam ad is the industry term for an ad made simply for the purpose of entering it into advertising award shows. It’s made for a client without the client’s consent, and sometimes, the agency or creatives don’t even have that client on their roster.

Bloomberg surpasses Reuters in web traffic for July.

The Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam has developed high-quality 3D reproductions of some of its finest paintings, with what it describes as the most advanced copying technique ever seen.

Haunted Play House At The Museum Of Contemporary Art In Tokyo.

Siri: The Horror Movie.

This is what’s called a Tetris “line race” (also known as a “sprint”), in this case an attempt to clear 40 lines in the minimum possible time.

Strongest hands in the world.

Strawberry cake.